Journey To U.s. Full Of Risk

October 2, 2002|By Letta Tayler Foreign correspondent

COPINOLITO, El Salvador — Yajaira Aracely Fuentes was a robust 8-year-old last year when her parents paid a smuggler to take her from this humid mountain hamlet to Virginia, where they had migrated in search of work.

The dark-haired girl returned to Copinolito in October, her brown eyes glazed with trauma and her frame emaciated from tuberculosis she caught after her smuggler abandoned her five months earlier in Guatemala. She died Aug. 30 from her illness.

Each year, thousands of Central Americans working in the United States, many of them undocumented, try to reunite with their children by paying smuggling rings to take them over the U.S. border. The rings have mushroomed since the mid-1990s, when the United States began sealing the U.S-Mexico border, leaving open only the harshest terrain.

Rather than risk walking their children across such inhospitable turf, many parents pay groups to bring minors through border checkpoints using false documents. But with profit as the smugglers' only motive, the journey can easily go awry.

"These rings capitalize on the fact that families want to be reunited, but the children can end up abused, abandoned or even dead," said Hipolito Acosta, who heads the Houston office of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service.

The number of children caught entering the United States without parents or guardians has more than doubled in the past five years, from 2,375 in 1997 to 5,385 last year, according to the INS.

Last month, Acosta helped crack the largest child smuggling ring the INS has encountered. The ring brought up to 100 children a month from El Salvador to cities including New York, Los Angeles, Houston and Washington, D.C., Acosta said. .

Salvadoran children who traveled with the ring in April included 18-month-old Diego Jose Gomez, whose caretaker for the journey was his 7-year-old brother, Eduardo. .

Salvadoran children interviewed said the journey was horrific.

Iris Yesenia Trejo, 7, who traveled in the same group as Diego, still wakes up screaming from nightmares about the trip. "It was bad and scary," said the slender, pig-tailed girl, who was so distraught that she didn't eat for three days until she was returned to relatives in eastern El Salvador.

Some children said the smugglers slapped them, gave them almost no food or drink, took their possessions and made them sleep on floors of squalid hotels. "There was this drunk man who hit us for no reason and if anyone cried, he yelled at us even harder," said Sandy Lilibet Chavez, a gangly child with a gaze far too serious for her 11 years. "I kept thinking, `I will never see my father.'"

Working with the INS, Mexican authorities found Sandy and five other children in a filthy house in Mexico City five days after their departure from El Salvador in January.

Although he has working papers, Sandy's father, Juan Santos Chavez, can't legally leave the United States or bring his children north to live with him. Even Salvadorans who are granted residency -- a 12-year process -- must wait another five years before their children can join them.

U.S. and Central American authorities suspect some smugglers sell children for illegal adoption or to pornography rackets. But they have no way to gauge how widespread this practice is as relatives are scared to report missing children.

It took authorities five months to locate Yajaira last October in Tecun Uman, a ramshackle Guatemalan town across a muddy river from Mexico's southern border.

Yajaira was held there by a woman who intended to sell her for illegal adoption, according to neighbors. "The woman didn't let her contact her family and didn't give her enough to eat," said Elisabeth Arriola, a close family friend.

Yajaira's tuberculosis was acute by the time authorities found her. She is buried in an unmarked grave near the house of her grandmother, who raised her after her parents left for the United States when she was a toddler.

"Salvadorans go to the United States in search of the American dream," Arriola said. "But often all we end up with is tragedy."